1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to automatic speech recognition and more specifically to tightly coupling speech recognition and search components in the context of a speech-driven search application.
2. Introduction
With the exponential growth in the use of mobile devices in recent years, the need for speech-driven search interfaces is rapidly becoming apparent. The limited screen space and small or soft keyboards of mobile devices make it cumbersome to type text input of more than a few characters. Furthermore, by the mobile nature of these devices, users often use them in hands-busy environments, ruling out the possibility of typing text. The mobile environments of such devices are often noisy, making speech input much more troublesome than more quiet environments.
Speech search applications typically use automatic speech recognition (ASR) for transforming the user's speech input to text and a search component that uses the resulting text as a query to retrieve relevant documents from an information repository. Most of the literature on speech-driven search applications that are available in the consumer market emphasize the importance of the robustness of the ASR language model and the data needed to build such a robust language model, but search and recognition accuracy in speech searches continue as problems in this field.